Tuesday had started like all the others. That is to say, very badly…
Alexis Moreau had spilled his coffee on his jacket at 7:11 a.m., spent three minutes dabbing at the stain with the corner of a crumpled receipt, then decided it wasn't really visible anyway, so why bother.
He was thirty-two years old, held a lecturer position at Paris IV that everyone considered enviable but that he found exhausting all the same. His apartment was just over twenty-nine square meters, located on rue Championnet, and the living room radiator had been on strike since November… Fitting, given that the radiator model was called the "Yellow Vest."
He lived alone not for lack of charm or opportunity; you don't know him yet, but ask his friends and you'll see… More seriously, his passion for ancient history consumed too much of his time to start any decent relationship, and he preferred to devote himself to it body and soul. He often ate cereal for dinner plain dry grain, nothing more. Butter is overrated. He had also once told a colleague that his life was like a Word document that had never been saved.
She had laughed. He had not smiled. There you have it a fairly complete summary of Alexis's life. Not glorious, yes, he already knows.
That morning, he had slipped into his bag a worn-to-the-bone copy of The Conquest of Mexico by Hugh Thomas, a seven-hundred-page book with dog-eared corners, passages underlined in four different colors depending on the year, and an inexplicable soy sauce stain on chapter twelve — possibly the result of a misguided sushi evening. It had been his bedside book since he was sixteen. He had read it only eleven times and knew it better than his own birthday.
Sigh.
He had shoved his earphones in, started a podcast he wouldn't really listen to, and descended into the grimy Paris metro.
Line 13. Direction Saint-Denis, Université.
The Montrouge platform smelled of damp concrete and wet clothing. It was 7:23 in the morning and the Parisians were waiting for the metro the way one waits for bad news understandable, given the ashen color of the weather… Shoulders slightly hunched, eyes staring into nothing, together but profoundly alone. Alexis had positioned himself at the end of the platform, where there were slightly fewer people, and had opened his book.
He was at the chapter on Tenochtitlan.
The city spread across the water like the dream of a mad architect, he had read for the eleventh time, with its causeways striding over the lake, its markets humming with a hundred thousand voices, its pyramids rising toward a sky that belonged to gods alone.
He had suddenly stopped and looked at the long dark tunnel ahead of him, the rails gleaming in the half-light.
He thought about it often about that vanished city, that world swallowed beneath modern Mexico City, beneath the concrete and the traffic jams and the corner kebab shops. Sometimes, late at night, when he was grading papers from students who confused Moctezuma with Montezuma and Cortés with "some Spanish guy, maybe Portuguese," he had this strange thought of wanting to be there, despite all the horrors that had taken place.
Just… to be there and See. That magnificent city. To understand why so much beauty had been destroyed, to grasp how far human nature could go.
He had looked at his watch a cheap Casio he had worn since high school, its face slightly scratched, its band black rubber.
7:24.
The metro appeared to be running late.
The crowd behind him had grown slightly denser, but he hadn't paid it any attention.
It was an ordinary jostle. Someone had stumbled, as usual. A human domino chain followed. A hand in his back he never saw coming pushed him suddenly, the book flew… And so did he.
Time expanded in an absurd way, the way they say it does in moments like these. He had seen the rails rushing up to meet him and had thought, very distinctly, with the mildly grotesque calm of a brain running on adrenaline:
"Ah. So this is how it ends."
Then there had been the light of the headlights.
Then white.
In the white, someone had laughed.
That laughter was not human. It carried something deeper and older, resonating as though the sound came from inside the stones rather than from a throat.
And a deep, amused voice followed absolutely certain of itself and said one single thing:
- "You wanted to see. So look, you little fool."
The heat came first.
It was nothing like the damp, lukewarm heat of the metro. This was drier, denser, more solar pressing against the skin like a hand that was both benevolent and commanding. A heat that smelled of burnt resin, warm earth, something sweet and acrid at once which his brain identified in a fraction of a second before he even understood why.
"Copal."
He had read that word hundreds of times. He had annotated it, underlined it, explained it in lectures to half-asleep students. The ritual Aztec incense, a Bursera resin, used in every ceremony, burned constantly before altars, omnipresent in temples and homes alike.
He had never imagined it would smell like this.
"Actually, it's rather pleasant," he thought with a smile.
Alexis opened his eyes.
Or rather, something opened its eyes, and Alexis Moreau found himself looking through them. The sensation was strange like looking through a window slightly frosted over. The consciousness of the Parisian historian adult, disoriented overlaid the reflexes of a seven-year-old child waking from what must have been a troubled dream.
A sharp pain shot through his eyes brief, intense, like a needle of light piercing his brain. He blinked several times until it faded, and lay still on the mat, disoriented, letting the two memories sort themselves out.
My name is Alexis Moreau. I am thirty-two years old. I died in the metro like an idiot.
My name is Itzli-Quauhtli. I am seven years old. My father is Tezca-Tlachtli, a minor-ranking noble, and my mother's name is Xochicueitl.
"How is this possible??? How is this possible??"
And yet he was not dreaming. The ceiling above him was low and made of volcanic stone stained a deep red, crossed by a thin crack he recognized instantly from having seen it every morning of his… of their life. Golden light came in through an opening to his right, and somewhere distant but steady as a heartbeat the drums were beating.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
Slow. Steady.
The drums of the Templo Mayor, which had beaten at dawn every day since the world began to turn.
- "Itzli?"
The voice came from his left a fairly pretty woman who still looked quite young. Itzli would have put her at no more than her twenties, unlikely but probably not far off given the life expectancy of the era… She looked rather tired as she crouched beside the mat, eyes fixed on him with that particular expression mothers have when they know something is wrong but always hope they're mistaken.
Itzli understood everything she said, but there was a slight quality to her speech that told him this was not the French he was used to.
"Nahuatl, most likely, the language normally spoken in this era," he thought.
He realized with relief that he understood everything perfectly and would not need to explain why he could no longer understand anyone. The advantage of having absorbed the memories of the body's original owner.
"Sorry, original Itzli… I didn't choose to take your place, I promise…!!" he thought apologetically.
- "You cried out in your sleep, my son. Are you alright?"
He wanted to answer yes, Mama and stopped dead on that last word. Mama. This body knew that word for this woman. But Alexis Moreau had not had a mother since the age of twenty. He swallowed something hard in his throat.
- "I'm fine," he said. His voice was high, light a child's voice. "I just had a dream."
She placed her hand on his forehead, checked that he had no fever, and nodded once she was entirely satisfied he was alright. Then she stood, disappeared behind an embroidered cotton curtain, and he was alone.
He looked at his hands.
Small. Copper-skinned.
The nails short, the left palm faintly calloused the hands of someone who plays outside often. Seven years old, and yet these hands had never held a piece of chalk, never turned the pages of a university textbook, never spilled coffee on a grey jacket on a Tuesday morning.
He turned his right hand over, palm facing the sky.
And he saw the scar.
Fairly thin, probably old, a pearlescent white slightly paler than the surrounding skin. It formed a perfect circle at the center of his palm, with a series of small radiating lines inside it like the rays of a sun, or the divisions of a calendar, or like…
He thought hard, but the word escaped him slipping from both mind and tongue at the very moment he was about to grasp it.
"Damn it, I hate that feeling!" he thought in a wave of brief frustration.
He closed his fist around it.
Then he got up.
The window was nothing but a narrow cut in the stone, but what it offered to see was worth every book Alexis Moreau had ever read.
Tenochtitlan.
The city spread out below him like a living creature resting on the water, and the water itself was everywhere Lake Texcoco shimmering in every direction to the horizon, a deep blue-green pierced by causeways like stone arrows launched toward the shore. Thousands of canoes glided across the surface, loaded with flowers, maize, pottery, feathers — everything twenty million people could desire between dawn and dusk.
Further on, the double pyramid of the Templo Mayor rose toward the sky with the quiet certainty of something that has always existed and always will its two temples at the summit, one red for Huitzilopochtli, the other blue for Tlaloc, visible from every point in the city.
The air smelled of roasted maize, copal, lake mud, and the cooking smoke of a hundred thousand hearths.
"That wasn't in the books," he said to himself, breathing in deeply with pleasure.
Books could describe the grandeur but not the smell. They could count the pyramids but not the sound of canoes on the water at dawn that soft, steady scraping that resembled breathing.
Alexis took a long time to realize he was crying.
He wiped his child's eyes with the back of his child's hand.
In the shadow of the corridor behind him, something moved.
He spun around quickly, but there was no one only the cotton curtain swaying gently, as though someone had just passed through. But his mother had left the other way, and the footsteps he had heard were too slow to be hers and too silent for any ordinary person.
He stared at the shadow for a long moment, but it no longer moved, obedient to the daylight.
He turned back to the window, thoughtful.
"Cortés arrives in fifteen years," he thought. "Fifteen years. One hundred and eighty months. And I am seven years old and barely over a meter tall." He thought it wryly.
He breathed in slowly the air of 1504.
"There's going to be work to do," he finally sighed.
Then Itzli-Quauhtli, son of a minor noble of Tenochtitlan who was also Alexis Moreau, Parisian historian, dead on a Tuesday morning pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the window and decided, for the very first time in this new life, that he was certainly not going to wait for death with his arms crossed.
Because he knew exactly what it would cost to not try and exactly what massacre would follow.
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Nahuatl Glossary :
Copal: A sacred ritual incense drawn from the resin of the Bursera tree, burned as an offering to the gods
Templo Mayor: The Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, a double pyramid dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc
Pipiltin: The Aztec nobility, the social class of educated warriors and priests
Nahuatl: The language of the Aztec Empire, still spoken by more than one million people today